Another lame-brained idea to shoot down

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Another lame-brained idea to shoot down
Jules Witcover
September 3, 2003

WASHINGTON - Now that John M. Poindexter, he of the screwy scheme for selling "war futures," has been bounced from the State Department and the idea with him, an even more bizarre notion has surfaced from the academic sector.

Michael McFaul, a Stanford political science professor and Hoover Insitution research fellow, has recently written that to cope with the fiasco following the ouster of Saddam Hussein and President Bush's efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East, yet another Cabinet department is needed.

"To help articulate and execute a refined course," Mr. McFaul offered in a Washington Post op-ed piece, "President Bush should create a Department of Democratic Regime Change headed by a Cabinet-level official - the offensive equivalent of the defense-oriented Department of Homeland Security."

Yes, you read that right. He explains: "The State Department's mission is diplomacy between states, not the creation of new states. The Pentagon's mission should remain regime destruction; its formidable capacities of regime construction should be moved into a new agency, which would also appropriate resources from the Agency for International Development (particularly the Office of Transitional Initiatives), the State Department, Treasury, Commerce, Justice and Energy."

He goes on: "This new department must include an office for grand strategy on democratic regime change and be endowed with prestige, talented people, and above all else resources. Our capacity to help build new states must be as great as our capacity to destroy them. ... Radical? Yes. Unprecedented? No."

The Stanford prof says his scheme "is exactly what leaders with vision undertook after World War II as a way for dealing with the new threat of communism. Their creations included the CIA, the National Security Council, Radio Free Europe and a bipartisan commitment to the grand strategy of containment as the guiding doctrine of American foreign policy."

But wait a minute. Bush's invasion of Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein was conquest, not containment. This scheme would amount to institutionalizing a radical new course for American foreign policy that has not undergone even the most rudimentary review and scrutiny by Congress. And since when is the Pentagon's mission "regime destruction"? Isn't the prime responsibility keeping America so strong that it will not be attacked?

Professor McFaul, in a phone interview, says he may have erred in giving his proposed new Cabinet-level agency the name he did. On reflection, he says, it may have been more prudent to call it something like the Department of Democratic Assistance, because the phrase "regime change" has taken on a connotation more pointed than it has in academic circles.

His intention, he says, would be the creation of a new federal entity to more effectively promote "democratization or governance" under a different label, because he says "regime change," as used by the Bush administration, "politicizes that term."

Mr. McFaul says the new department, under whatever name, would give President Bush a third choice beyond his stated decision to "stay the course" in Iraq, Afghanistan and on the "road map" for Israeli-Palestinian peace, and just getting out.

But why not a Department of Democratic Regime Change? The administration already has on board such "talented people" with long-held ideas about regime change as Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the Darth Vader of pre-emption, Richard Perle, in an advisory role. From the private sector could come William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard magazine and a prime brainstormer on what's now called the right of "anticipatory self-defense" against perceived threats from unfavored regimes.

It's a measure of how insidious this new "Bush Doctrine" can be when an academician can dream up a means of giving it permanent stature and structure in the conduct of a new and radical foreign policy that breaks with more than half a century of successful containment in the Cold War.

Candidate George W. Bush, in his 2000 campaign debate with Al Gore on foreign policy, said he wanted nothing to do with nation-building or any American role as the world's policeman. But his post-Sept. 11 doctrine encourages such ideas. Mr. McFaul says he has had conversations with the administration about a new department but does not feel free to say with whom. In any event, it's not likely to happen - is it?
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Jules Witcover writes from The Sun's Washington bureau. His column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun